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What Commerce Orbit is

Commerce Orbit sells your products on your own website or a hosted shop, takes payment through your own Stripe account, handles business customers and can work with MAM Software.

Explanation3 min read

Commerce Orbit is where you keep your products, take orders and send them out. An organisation can run several shops, each with its own products, customers, orders and payments. Shoppers buy on your own website or on the hosted shop Commerce Orbit gives you, and pay by card or any other method your Stripe account offers. Business customers can also order on invoice.

Your money stays yours

Commerce Orbit takes payments through your own Stripe account, connected with a key you make in Stripe. Shoppers pay into your account, Stripe pays out to your bank, and Commerce Orbit takes no fee on orders. Card details go straight from the shopper to Stripe and never reach Commerce Orbit. See Connect your Stripe account.

What it does

Products
What you get
Up to 3 options and 100 variants per product, SKUs, prices in several currencies, compare-at prices, images, specifications, SEO text and translations. See Products.
Stock
What you get
Stock per variant at each location, with low-stock alerts. See Stock and locations.
Collections
What you get
Groups of products you pick by hand, or that follow rules such as a tag or a price. See Collections.
Orders
What you get
Payment, sending, tracking, refunds and cancellations, with a history on every order. See Orders.
Business customers
What you get
Companies with a VAT number, a price list and invoice terms. See Customers and companies.
Taxes and shipping
What you get
EU VAT with One Stop Shop, reverse charge and exports, shipping zones and collection in store. See Shipping and taxes.
MAM Software
What you get
An optional connection that brings stock and prices from MAM and sends orders to it. See The MAM integration.

Where shoppers buy

  • Your website in CMS Orbit: editors put products on pages with blocks, and the pages refresh by themselves when a price or stock changes. See Show your products on your website.
  • Any other website: your developers use the storefront API or GraphQL. See Get started as a developer.
  • The hosted shop: product, collection, cart, checkout and order pages at app.bifrostorbit.com/commerce/shop/ followed by your shop address. See The hosted shop.

How it fits with the rest of Orbit

People sign in once with Orbit and get Commerce Orbit from your organisation's members, with a role that decides what they can do. See Who can do what.

  • CMS Orbit shows your products and collections on website pages. Products stay in Commerce Orbit; nothing is copied.
  • Insights Orbit can count orders placed as a goal, with each order's total as revenue.
  • Travel Orbit and Careers Orbit don't share anything with your shop, but a sending domain set up in any of them works for all three. See Emails to customers.
  • AI assistants such as Claude can read products and orders and improve product text. See Connect an AI assistant.

The overview

Overview shows what needs you first: paid orders still to send, unpaid and overdue invoices, orders waiting for MAM or that MAM didn't take, and products with 3 or fewer left. Below that are your sales for the last 90 days, compared with the 30 days before, and your best-selling products. Sales leave out unpaid, failed and cancelled orders, and subtract refunds.

Reports shows sales by month for the last 12 months, in each currency you sell in, and customers grouped by the month of their first order: how many came back in each month after it, and what they spent. See Reports and cohorts.

What isn't there yet

Commerce Orbit is new. These aren't part of it yet: customer accounts with saved addresses, automatic discounts, buy-one-get-one and gift cards, a returns portal and editing an order after it is placed. VAT numbers are stored as given and not yet checked against the EU's VIES service.

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Read next

Get started with Commerce OrbitThe steps from an empty organisation to a shop that takes orders: settings, Stripe, taxes and shipping, your first product and a test order.Connect your Stripe accountMake a restricted key in Stripe with exactly the access Commerce Orbit needs, paste it in, and know what happens if the key stops working.ProductsAdd products with options and variants, SKUs, prices in each currency, compare-at prices, images, specifications, SEO text and translations, and choose when they are for sale.OrdersHow an order moves from checkout to paid, sent and done, what each payment, sending and MAM status means, and how to find an order and read its history.The hosted shopCommerce Orbit gives every organisation a ready shop with product, collection, cart, checkout and order pages, in your languages and currencies. When to use it, and when to sell on your own website instead.Show your products on your websiteConnect a website space in CMS Orbit, so editors can put products and collections on pages with blocks, with prices and stock that stay current by themselves.The MAM integrationConnect Commerce Orbit to MAM Software for stock, prices, trade accounts and orders, try it with the sandbox first, and know what happens when MAM is slow, down or switched off.